Event

The 19th InfoCom World Conference 2017 with the title “Fiber to the people: The Gigabit Era!” took place on 25 October 2017, in Athens (Greece). It is an annual international conference organized by the “Mobile Telephony & Telecommunications” and “InfoCom” magazines and Smart Press S.A. Furthermore, this event was a meeting point for executives of Telecommunications, IT and Media, who had the opportunity to attend and actively participate in several sessions by presenting their innovative works towards the technology evolution.

The 5G-MEDIA project was presented during the special session organized by OTE (Hellenic Telecommunications Organization S.A.) and concerned all European research projects that OTE participates. Mrs. Maria Belesioti (Research Programs Section, OTE S.A.) demonstrated the main objectives, technical challenges and use cases of the 5G-MEDIA project. During her speech, it was clarified how 5G-MEDIA intends to investigate advanced media applications in order to realize the benefits of 5G networks. It is also worth noting that the attendees were very interested on this topic, mainly asking questions about a more detailed technical explanation and implementation of the different use cases.

5G-MEDIA Project will officially participate in the NEM Summit 2017, which will be held in Madrid on 29-30 November 2017. The NEM Summit is an international conference and exhibition, open to co-located events and organised every year since 2008 by the NEM Initiative for all those interested in broad area of Media, Content, and Creativity. For its 10th edition, 5G-MEDIA is contributing with a technical paper entitled “Media industry meets 5G: the 5G-MEDIA project in 5G PPP phase 2”.

Over the years, the NEM Summit has grown to become an annual not-to-be-missed event, providing attendees with a key opportunity to meet and network with prominent stakeholders, access up-to-date information, discover latest technology and market trends, identify research and business opportunities, and find partners for upcoming EU-funded calls for projects.

The 5G-MEDIA paper has been accepted by the NEM Summit Program Committee and it will be presented during the “Opening Plenary Session of the NEM Summit 2017” on November 29th. With this paper, the project will take part in discussions on the latest development in European media, content, and creativity, by explaining its objectives, concept and technical approach, as well as its Use Cases, as summarised here below.

5G-MEDIA CORE CONCEPT

The focus of 5G research and innovation has been dedicated to the required advances in network technologies: spectrum, radio access, software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) and cloud infrastructure, flexible management and control architectures and development and operations systems.

Significant progress is being made towards the roll out of the first 5G networks in 2020; however, less effort has been put on the applications and services that will make use of and exploit such advanced 5G capabilities.

In this context, the 5G-MEDIA project aims at innovating media-related applications by investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both: to ensure the applications allocate the resources they require to deliver high Quality of Experience (QoE) while at the same time the network is not overloaded with media traffic.

In this respect, 5G-MEDIA addresses the objectives of i) capitalizing upon and extending the outcomes of the running 5G-PPP projects to offer an agile programming, verification and orchestration platform for media services, and ii) developing network functions and applications to be demonstrated in large-scale deployments of diverse requirements, targeting three well-defined use cases, that will serve to prove the outcomes of the initiative:

Top audio-visual professionals met in Madrid on October 4-5 at BIT Experience 2017, an event organised by IFEMA, the leading Trade Fair organiser in Spain.

BIT Experience allowed its participants to find out the latest news in technology applied to the audio-visual world. In this context, the 5G-MEDIA project, represented by RTVE, had the chance to participate and illustrate its global vision.

Pere Vila, Technological Strategy and Innovation of the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation (RTVE), carried out a presentation about 5G challenges, explaining what it is expected concerning 5G networks and services in the media world.

The speed of transportation in A/V signals is one the most important benefits for broadcasters, minimizing the availability times of new contents.

Adolfo Muñoz, Director of Broadcast and Networks at RTVE, had the opportunity to explain the global vision of 5G-MEDIA project, paying attention to its importance for public media, as well as its Use Cases. Media applications are amongst the most demanding services within networks, requiring huge quantities of capacity for high audio-visual bandwidth. 5G-MEDIA aims at innovating media-related applications by investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both.

The Use Cases presented were:

Mobile contribution, remote and smart production in broadcasting and

UHD over Content Delivery Network.

Pere Vila and Adolfo Muñoz also participated in a round table in relation to other 5G Projects, highlighting the strong bonds between 5G-MEDIA and initiatives like 5G-CITY.

Our architecture and use case team has just met in Pisa from 11 to 12 September 2017 to further progress on the definition of the 5G-MEDIA architecture and its use cases.

We thoroughly discussed the three 5G-MEDIA leading use cases on tele-immersive applications, smart and remote production and UHD content distribution over CDN. From end-user and media system requirements we identified key NFV functionalities, which can be realized integrating a number of available software assets from 5G PPP Phase 1 projects (e.g. SONATA, SELFNET, COGNET, etc.) and/or mainstream open source SDN/NFV projects (e.g. OSM, OPNFV, Open Baton, etc.). It’s necessary to progress with an assessment of these software products to eventually select the parts which better fit the 5G-MEDIA architecture we are designing.

The IEEE 5G Greece Summit took place on July 11, 2017, in Thessaloniki (Greece), co-located with Emerging Technologies for 5G and Internet of Things. As part of the successful series of 5G Summits that have been held since 2015 in America, Asia and Europe, the IEEE 5G Greece Summit contributed to continuous provision of a platform for the industry leaders, innovators, and researchers from the industry and academic community to collaborate and exchange ideas in this emerging technology that may help in driving the standards and rapid deployment.

The Summit brought together a rich blend of speakers from industry, academia, research labs, standardization and regulation bodies, covering different main topics, including a session dedicated to European Research Projects on 5G (Session 4, cf. the program here). Representatives from several European projects on the 5G domain had the opportunity to present their initiatives and showcase their main achievements to a wide audience composed of European Commission representatives, 5G PPP Phase I and II projects, as well as private companies.

During his speech entitled Main aspects and impact of 5G-Phase II projects Bluespace, 5G-Media and Slicenet, Dr. George Agapiou, Head of Wireless & Optical Lab at OTE Group SA (Greece), presented the use cases and technical challenges that 5G-MEDIA Project will undertake in the next 2 years. 5G-MEDIA is an initiative that aims at innovating media-related applications by investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both.

The 26th edition of the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC’17) took place in Oulu, Finland from 12 to 15 June 2017. With the theme “5G – European Roadmap, Global Impact”, the conference reflected the consistent development of network connectivity technologies in Europe, providing a clear focus towards 5G validation and deployment in vertical application areas. Representatives from the 19 Projects from 5G PPP Phase 1 had the opportunity to present and to showcase their achievements and results, while the European Commission announced the launch of 5G PPP Phase 2, with 21 new projects. These projects were presented during two special sessions – “Introduction of 5G PPP Phase 2 @EuCNC 2017 Session 1”, which took place on June 14th from 16:00 to 17:30 and “Introduction of 5G PPP Phase 2 @EuCNC 2017 Session 2”, which took place on June 15th from 9:00 to 10:30. 5G-MEDIA is one of these new initiatives and the only project seeking to boost media-related applications through state of the art 5G infrastructure capabilities. Coordinated by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (Italy), the consortium assembles the expertise of a first-rate team of 14 European organizations. 5G-MEDIA aims at innovating media-related applications by investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both.

The project was presented during the first session on June 14 by Mr. Pasquale Andriani (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica. During his speech, Mr. Andriani introduced the main objectives, technical challenges and use cases of the project. In addition, he explained how 5G-MEDIA intends to collaborate within the 5G PPP and its Working Groups. For further references, the slides of the meeting are available here. Stay tuned on 5G-MEDIA Twitter account for more news.